In 2007, David Wiley at Colorado State University opened the first open online course on open education, which had about 50 participants from 8 countries. In 2008, the term "MOOC" was first introduced by Dave Cormier to describe George Siemens and Stephen Downes' course "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge", which had 25 enrolled students but over 2,300 open participants. In 2011, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig of Stanford offered their artificial intelligence course online for free, attracting over 160,000 self-enrolled students from around the world. This led to the founding of for-profit education companies Udacity, Coursera, and EdX to offer large-scale online university courses

1. MOOC STORY
Instructor: Asma Alkhuzaimi

2. 2007
In 2007, David Wiley at Colorado State
University opened his course on Open
Education.
As a result, about 50 people from 8 countries
participated in the course.

3. 2008
 MOOC was first introduced in 2008 by Dave Cormier to
describe Siemens and Downes‟ “Connectivism and
Connective Knowledge” course.
 It was initially designed for a group of 25 enrolled, fee
paying students to study for credit and at the same time
was opened up to registered only learners worldwide.

4. 2008
Using many different platforms to engage
students with the topic, including Facebook
groups, Wiki pages, blogs, forums and other
resources.
As a result, over 2,300 people participated in
the course without paying fees or gaining
credit (Wikipedia, 2012) and 170 of them
created their own blogs.

5. 2011
 In 2011, two Stanford Professors Sebastian Thrun and
Peter Norvig decided to offer “Introduction to Artificial
Intelligence” for free online.
 Designed to resemble real classroom experiences and
offer high-quality classes for everyone, the idea had the
advantage of carrying the prestigious Stanford name.

6. 2011
More than 160,000 students in 190
countries signed up, and for the first
time, an open online course was truly
„massive‟.

7. 2012
In 2012, this led Thrun and Norvig to build a
new business model for online knowledge, the
start-up Udacity.
It did not take long until other professors
adapted their ideas using own resources. Within
one year, two more American start-ups for
MOOCs appeared: Coursera and EdX.

8. 2013
 In 2013, the Open University is building its
own MOOC platform, Futurelearn, which will
feature universities from the United Kingdom.
There are many other independent MOOC
initiatives appearing, including OPen2study in
Australia and Iversity in Germany.

9. RESOURCES
Marques, J. Apr 17, 2013 . A Short History of MOOCs and Distance
Learning . In MOOC news and reviews. Retrieved December 26,
2013, from http://moocnewsandreviews.com/.